"For more than a decade, I have been investigating the ways that mobile technology affects individuals, businesses and society," Scornavacca says. "There has been a huge shift in how people interact with their mobile devices over the past few years. My work looks at the different ways this innovation has disrupted how we live, work and play. It's an honor to be recognized for that by my peers."
Scornavacca has been working on understanding how mobile technology has set the world on a new course—he calls it a "fluid, ubiquitous digital ecosystem"—that is profound in its impact on human behavior of all kinds, as well as on the means of production.
For Scornavacca, it's not only that you can buy just about anything via your smartphone—it's the constant connectedness that enables people to learn, communicate and make decisions on virtually anything imaginable through a platform that lives in the palm of your hand. People use their mobile devices to order a sandwich one minute, then in the next they can discuss the impact of a war with potentially tens of thousands of others users. Important decisions are made in the time it takes to read a tweet or scan an email, on the streets of a big city or in the middle of a meadow.
"The extinction of the mobile phone and emergence of the smartphone not only signals a change of how mobile devices are categorized, but it also represents a remarkable shift in the fundamental nature of this type of technology," Scornavacca says. "Now our mobile devices are complex, multi-purpose, multi-context ubiquitous media systems that encapsulate various functions and provide a steady flow of information."
Scornavacca, who a year ago moved from New Zealand to Baltimore, said he has had a lifelong interest in how technology drives behavior, and vice versa. In the late 1990s, he was conducting research on e-commerce and envisaged that its future would be mobile technology.
"I was fascinated to find that mobile technologies could break the temporal and spatial boundaries of information access," he says.
He noticed that Japan was embracing the advent of mobile technology with a particular zeal, so in 2001 he relocated there to become a researcher in the field at Yokohama National University, with a scholarship at the Japanese Ministry of Science and Technology. He recalls first arriving in Tokyo and hurrying into a store to check out their mobile phones—not only to see what the devices could do but to learn how people were using them.
"It was a time of tremendous change there, and I was certain it was just a matter of time before it caught on all across the world," he says.
Before he left for Japan, he noticed that Americans were using their cells only as a phone—they would hold the device up to their ear and speak. When he arrived in Japan, conversely, people were already looking at their phones—typing, ordering things, getting information through the Internet.
"The essential difference was between the ear and the eye," he says. "That tells you so much about what is happening with mobile technology."
Fast forward to today, and the evolution of mobile has reached a point where a handheld device can tell you how to go anyplace, do anything, and be prepared for whatever is next. Scornavacca says that as information access continues to increase, the issue becomes one of managing the technology in order to make the most out of it.
"I call it 'connectedness madness,' and it hits everybody's life," he says. "Are we more productive, happier and better now that we're more connected? It's a big question for our age."
While Scornavacca is always looking beyond the bells and whistles of all kinds of technology, he says it's important for people to recognize that they are in control of the tools—always and in all ways.
"We all talk about media dependency, and it's real," he says. "But I question why we are alarmed by it, when we don't have that reaction to being dependent on electrical power, or running water or whatever. We are just now getting perspective on these issues and coming to understand the level of disruption caused by this technology to society."
Meanwhile, Scornavacca continues to be recognized by his peers as a key contributor to the dialogue about mobile technology. He has written or co-written dozens of papers, book chapters and so on in peer-reviewed journals, ranging from case studies on the use of mobile in agribusiness to the patterns of user behavior in mobile advertising.
"This is a frontier of the digital revolution, and there is tremendous value in studying it as it happens," he says.
Learn more about Prof. Eusebio Scornavacca and the Merrick School of Business.
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the College of Public Affairs, the Merrick School of Business, the UB School of Law and the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.
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